don’t scare me like that google

For those of you who haven’t heard already, Google has announced that as part of a “spring cleaning”, they are shutting down Google Reader.

My previous solution was to use the RSS in Mail on OS X. But Apple yanked that out as of Mountain Lion (another instance of “Dammit, I was using that!”).

So now I’ve been doing a two-pronged solution of NetNewsWire parked as my local reader on my computer, which is where I keep up with authenticated feeds–and that synced in turn up to Google Reader, where I was keeping up with everything that wasn’t authenticated. That way I’ve been able to read things at work in between doing, well, work.

I tried feedHopper on my iPad, since it was the ONLY RSS app I was able to find that’d do authenticated feeds at all; all of the rest I looked at were strictly Google Reader clients. And I’ve also tried Flipboard, but honestly, the ‘magazine’ type layout doesn’t do anything for me. Yes, it’s pretty, but it’s not at all helpful in keeping track of what things I’ve read and what things I haven’t. Which is the whole point of me trying to aggregate all the things I want to follow in one or two places.

But now that Google Reader’s going away I’m going to have to rearrange things AGAIN!

What will have to happen now: find out whether NetNewsWire, my current frontrunner for RSS apps, will implement any kind of syncing solution between computer, devices, and web, maybe via iCloud. If they do that, I will happily throw them my money.

Alternately, if anybody out there wants to recommend me an app that will a) specifically handle authenticated feeds, and b) sync between computer, devices, and web, I’d LOVE to hear about it.

If you want to go hunting for a new RSS solution yourself, I’ll also point you at these links:

So there I am googling ‘valor of the healer angela highland’, just to see if I find any interesting links that might be talking about forthcoming April releases in the SF/F or Carina realms and such–and I did in fact find one, a link with a roundup of titles due to be released in April. I’m on that list, which is of interest since this woman is a bookseller in Canada (in Toronto, even), but is also specifically calling out Carina SF/F titles!

But that’s not what this post is about. This post is about two other, less amusing links that came up in the same search results. They live at a couple of domains that look like they’re pointing at pretty much the exact same kind of page–and in both cases, they are pretending to offer a free download of Valor of the Healer.

“Well, shit,” I said. Had I really been pirated? Over a month before my release?

I dug into the suspicious pages a little further, though, by doing a View Source command on them in my browser. (View Source IS the friend of the QA web tester.) In both cases what I saw in the code were a bunch of links actually going off to amazon.com–but with a lot of extra parameters on the URLs that make me think that they’re trying to mooch off of the Amazon affiliate system.

I’m told that this kind of thing is actually quite common, affiliate sites pretending to be torrent sites. Which strikes me as simultaneously hilarious and kind of sad, really. And for all I know these two sites–or maybe one site, since both of the pages had pretty much the exact same layout and text to them, except for differing domains–may be legitimate Amazon affiliates.

But I kinda doubt it.

Long story short, when in doubt, check my Valor of the Healer page for the roundup of all the official places selling the book. It IS available for preorder on practically all the major ebook vendors’ sites now, though it has yet to show up on the Sony bookstore. And if you have any doubt whatsoever about where’s best to buy the book from, go straight to carinapress.com!